First: I’m sorry, but I have some muscles. Yes, I am girl, but I was also endowed with those contracting fibers that allow for movement and also for me to be a B.A. (not bachelor of arts, though I am that too.) I have muscles and I’m not going to apologize for them. Except, I guess, in the first line where I said– well nevermind! I got muscles.

I say all of this because, at my current place of employment, there was a certain “re-imaging” going on. Which basically means that we put on a fresh coat of paint, refinished some woodwork, got a few (actually a lot of) new TVs, and (finally) all new tables, booths, and chairs.

What this meant for the staff is that someone had to move all this stuff. You can bet it was going to be us. Now, this was a volunteer basis job for little extra cash. I thought, “I like cash.” Also, I didn’t think at all about the lifting… because I can lift.

Refresher, does this look like a girl who can move a few things around? Well, just– look, support me in my story!

Anyway, the other girls and I noticed a pattern where one of us girls would go for something to carry and suddenly a man would show up offering unnecessary assistance or to suggest that we go grab something a bit lighter. Like a cushion. A cushion. (To be fair, someone had to carry the cushions and they were rather large and awkward, but still!)

And let me just say, I really appreciate the considerate effort behind such suggestions and offerings of help. I’m not that arrogant. I’m glad chivalry still lives…

HOWEVER. Isn’t it funny that I only got hurt at times when the guys were trying to help me???

Girls: great at communication. They would tell me when we were putting something down and where we were going for the most part.

Guys: manhandle the furniture and figure that their buffness is covering everything.

Newsflash: I need to know what your plan is for putting this wooden thing in the truck.

The first thing that happened was that when I beast-lifted a small booth all by myself (it’s not hard if you get the angles right and support with your hips and legs) it was taken rather abruptly from me by my manager when I brought it to the truck.

I said, “Hey, wait, where are you–?”

Basically my forearm got a decent-looking scrape because he figured I couldn’t hold the thing much longer (I could have held it much longer).

The girls said they saw it exactly the same way. I was totally fine until he tried to grab it.

Next:

I was carrying this very heavy booth (at an angle which I later discovered with one of my girls was completely unnecessary and made the whole operation 10x harder) with one of the hired guys.

Anyway, when we handed off the booth, ~no surprise~ it got jarred somehow and hit my left hand pretty hard. Enough to put a thumbnail-wide line of a blood blister on the inside of my palm.

I should say that I already had a scratch there healing. I cut myself on a knife… I burned myself on a skillet… Nope. Ok, it was a Sunday and that morning during my shower I had scratched myself somehow opening a shampoo bottle.

The shame. I know.

Well, I had hydrogen-peroxided the daylights out of that son of a gun, so it was on the road to healing, but now it’s still there (Today is the Friday after.) because some man hit it with a booth trying to help and turned it into a blood-blister.

Well that’s basically it. Women can do some stuff. Dudes need to communicate.